Essay Space and Time

 

Space in a Time of Pandemic and Madness

 

Norman Simms

« ung abysme de science »

In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, the father giant hopes to create a school syllabus that will turn his offspring into “an abyss of science.”[1] By science is meant, of course, knowledge, the knowledge that comes from books and is therefore already known and memorable. But what about ung abyss?  It is a steep, deep hole in the ground, the sea or the sky, and those who stand on the brink become dizzy, suffer a terrible vertigo which makes them feel like they are about to fall in, leap in driven by an intolerable fascination, or be pushed over the edge by some external force. This plunge into the dark unknowing place of non-being, descent or ascent into the empty heavens where all is empty and meaningless, our sense of space, the outer reaches of the cosmos—into a black hole.

So, that evening, he was sunk in an exhausted torpor….He had no thought of anything. He felt the void growing, growing from moment to moment. He tried not to see the abyss that drew him to its brink: and in spite of himself he leaned over and his eyes gazed into the depths of the night, In the void, chaos was stirring, and faint sounds came from the darkness. Agony filled him: a shiver ran down his spine: his skin tingled: he clutched the table so as not to fall, Convulsively he awaited nameless things, a miracle, a God…[2]

This is what is called a mise en abyme:[3] into the regress of a person holding a mirror showing a man holding a mirror showing the mirror ad infinitum, being thrust back further and further into the trauma of all beginnings; or the opening up of Russian matryoshka dolls, one inside the other, smaller and smaller, until there is no space left, consciousness having swallowed itself. Some writers have written, too, of an abyss of abysses, filled with overwhelming knowledge, downwards or upwards, each mis en abyme contradicting the other, cancelling it out, and then leaving no room for awareness—an epistemological crisis. Beyond the aporia, the place where logic gives out, paradigms fail and the blind spot at the centre of perception and memory is swallowed up by its own abject silence.

Space no longer exists. Time vanishes. This is the point of all difference, otherness, and new beginnings. Before there were words or images, recognizable sensations or phantoms of self, there is nothing: prehistory, an Urwelt (original world) of primary trauma—

We are, so to speak, placed in a labyrinth out of which we cannot any longer find the thread that leads us back: and perhaps we should not even find it. Thus, we tie together the thread of history, where the thread of our own memory breaks, and live, where our own existence fades away, in the existence of a prehistoric world [Vorwelt].[4]

Nothing makes sense any more, normalcy disintegrates and a great cloud of unknowing covers all.[5] New knowledge is made, not out in the environing world of institutions and authority, but in the interior landscape of the mind reconfiguring itself, slowly, gradually and agonizingly. Old things attract but cannot be deciphered or categorized. The world becomes unheimlich, uncanny; or bizarre, grotesque and unsettling.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…[6]

These times of crisis and trauma come to individuals and to nations, sometimes more than once in a lifetime, and they do not always come into awareness with the shock of recognition as they do with revolutions, civil wars and world wars, as well as with natural disasters, epidemics and climatic shifts. As in Freudian dream analysis and tracing back the origins of everyday tics and malapropos, so with rabbinical midrash and Talmudic exegesis in a focusing in on contradictions, misplaced words and orthographical peculiarities; and so, too, in Aby Warburg’s mapping the growth and development in repeated pathos-laden formulae in works of art, where hidden and suddenly revealed glimpses of freedom and consolation break into the static images of academic convention::

The profound yearning for human freedom develops within the scholar through an awareness, rarely found in art historians, of the conditioning faculty of the “dark side”—in short, his consciousness of walking on the edge of the abyss. That is why Warburg’s discourse is so stirring, with its complex weave of science and magic and the relative independence of form from a subject, who in turn is decentered from the traditional territories of inner nature.[7]

Where Warburg saw the Nachleben (afterlife) of these powerful triggers of mental energy (engrammes), Freud started to see something more dynamic: Nachträglichkeit.[8]  As he traced back the repeated and reconfigured memories in the so-called Wolfman, Freud developed an idea that subsequent traumatic shocks not only could be seen to transform earlier moments of fear, humiliation and suffering, but the later dreams, phobias and resistances became part of a new pattern of unconscious energy breaking through the surface of awareness.  But before Freud came Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser: A Psychological Novel.[9] 

The human mind, for Moritz, was no longer an atemporal substance with universal features; it was a singular constellation of ideas which an individual had acquired over time. To study the mind, it was therefore necessary to follow simultaneously two paths of inquiry: to attend to the behavioural oddities and idiosyncrasies that characterizes a specific human being, and to make legible these features by tracing them back through time to the moment of their formation.[10]

That moment in time, that place in the dark abyss of the mind was not unique to an eccentric individual, but shared with an historical group whose cultural traumas were shaped over thousands of generations.

Today we are again standing on the edge of the abyss, where the maelstrom of stupidity swirls, the whirlwind of pandemic sucks us in and the tourbillon of tyranny threatens everything we thought we knew and the reality that seemed secure.

 

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[1] William N. West, “Encircling Knowledge” Renaissance Quarterly 68:4 (2015)  1327-1340.

[2]  Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe, trans. Gilbert Cannan. (New York: The Modern Library, 1938. Original French in 10 volumes 1904-1912.) Vol. I, p. 252.

[3]  Marcus Smith, Into the Abyss: A Study of the Mise en  Abyme. Ph.D. thesis. London Metropolitan University 2016.

[4] Andeas Gailus, “A Case of Individuality: Karl Phlipp Moritz and the Magazine for Empirical Psychology” New German Critique 79 (2000) 67-105.

[5] Anonymous, The Cloude of Unknowyng, second half of the fourteenth century.

[6] W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919).

[7] Franco Bernabei, “Jan Biaŀostocki, Formalism, and Iconology” Artibus et Historiae, 11:22 (1990) 11.

[8] Allesandra Campo, Nachträglichkeit: Il contributo della psicoanalisi alla definizione di una filosofia del processo. Università degli Studi di Roma Tre: Tesi di dottorato un Filosofia e Teoria delle Scienze Umane, 2014/2015.

 

[9]  Karl Philipp Moritz,  Anton Reiser: Psychological Novel. Trans. Ritchie Robertson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997. Original German, 1782-1783.

[10] Andreas Gailus, “A Case of Individuality: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Magazine for Empirical Psychology” New German Critique (79) (2000)  410.

Modern Art: A Personal Note

 

Modern Art: A Personal Note

Norman Simms

 

 

In 1958, at the age of eighteen, during the summer before I went to university, I used to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. At first, I decided that I would sit in front of a huge painting by Jackson Pollack to see if I could see why there was such a fuss about his work. The squiggles of paint dripped over this canvas made no sense at all but I was determined to see if I stared at it long enough something would get through to my poor naïve mind. After an hour and a half, I could not take it any longer, and wandered around from room to room, until way in the back as far from the entrance as you could go on the first floor, there were a series of tables in which were placed row on row of curious little carved pieces of antique jewellery. I was fascinated and walked slowly around each table, then came back to the first one, read the explanation and the captions and stared intently into each one of these intaglios, a word I have never come across before.

 

The next weekend I went back to the Met again—between which time I worked at a dress factory in Jersey City—and, after less than twenty minutes in front of the Pollack, which still made absolutely no sense to me, I went back to the exhibition of classical jewellery and especially the intaglio. Each one, delicately crafted, and accompanied by a drawing of a mirrored image and an allusion to some mythical or legendary scene from Greek or Latin myth and literature. I tried to see what was supposedly there and sometimes the scene did seem to be filled with human and semi-divine figures and some hint of a landscape. At that stage, especially before there were computers to offer online sites that explained such esoteric matters, or anyone whom I could ask advice, just the fascination was enough to satisfy. The next week I took the subway to Fifth Avenue and walked straight to the room at the back, skipping the Jackson Pollocks and everything else, and walked even further through the exhibitions on display. Then I found some glass covered tables with signet rings and seals from the ancient Middle East, and it took another few weeks to understand that these were from Mesopotamia and similar cultures, and the strange creatures and grotesque masks were supposedly depicting the mythology of these ancient peoples.

 

The end of summer came and it was time to go off to Alfred University, a small private college in upstate New York, where, three times a week at 8 a.m. the freshman class was introduced to Western Civilization. We were asked to read translations of and selections from Sumerian and Mesopotamian poetry, Greek myths and epics and Roman plays and debates. Gradually it dawned on me, when not only reading these assigned texts but also looking at the pictures on the covers and inside pages of these books, that these were the sources or the expression of what I had seen in the seals, signet rings, intaglios and other miniature jewellery during the summer. Over the next several years, moving to Saint Louis, Missouri and attending Washington University, as I made myself familiar with English, French and German literature, and especially in graduate school reading great poems like Le Roman de la Rose and the Divina Comedia, it became evident that those tiny works of art which I used to stare at for hours at the Met were a vast reservoir of images and ideas worked out in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It took many more years going out into the world, first to Canada and then to New Zealand,  and teaching literature, culture and religion to realize even more clearly that there could be no separation between the words, images and ritual gestures in the art work. Year by year, again with almost no advice or direction from anyone, except what I would read almost randomly in books of art history, culture and psychoanalysis how everything was tied together and my naïve and unstructured scholarly research would illuminate the picture emerging. No longer were they just splotches, squiggles and random dribbles, as in a Jackson Pollock painting, but something profoundly coherent and consistent.  Now past the age of eighty and long since retired as a university lecturer, I am ready to face modern art.

 

 Holocaust Book Review

Judy Batalion. The Light of Days: Women Fighters of the Jewish Resistance, Their Untold Story. London: Virago Press, 2021. New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2020. xvi + 556 + 16 plates of black and white photographs. + 1 map.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

 

This is a very well-written, powerful, important and sad book. It is about young women, usually between seventeen and thirty, who give themselves to the fight against the Nazi Holocaust with everything they have. These young women play more than the role of cooks, nursemaids or aides in the precarious shelters where Jews attempt to ide from the murderous bands that hunt them down and more than as couriers bringing messages between different groups of resisters and escapees. They are often the organizers, the spies who work to manipulate the systematic cruelty in Poland, and who give encouragement and courage to those whose lives are being crushed. The name for these women is kashariyot.

When a kasharit arrived with news about families and politics, it was a sign that they hadn’t been forgotten, that life went on outside their confined tortures that not everyone was depressed. These women were lifelines, “human radios,” trusted contacts,  supply dispatchers, and sources of inspiration. (p. 176)

Though many of these stories have already appeared, some in collections made near the end of the war and after the defeat of the Nazi regime, written in Yiddish or Polish or other East Europrsn languages, the author is able to develop the narratives and the characters into a moving text. The book also provides background to the persons, events and ideologies that are at work. Some of the scnes of horror are  more vivid—and harrowing in their starkness— than in most autobiographies and professional histories and novels of the type, giving a sense of reality that is too often missed.  But it is above all the moral, emotional and psychological struggles within the lives of the women themselves that’s its persuasive power rests. It was Batalion says, “A constant pageant of deception.”

 

Coming from many walks of life, religious and secular, wealthy and poor and sometimes already affiliated to Jewish and Zionist causes or until the beginning of the round-ups  and killings indifferent to politics, these women have an almost instinctive commitment to fight the Nazis and to be active in helping others.  Throughout the book their stories show them facing with grim determination the need to hide their emotions, play various role to achieve their goals—smuggling guns, assisting families escape, ferreting out secrets from soldiers and policemen—and never to let their guard down, cautious before trusting anyone, and keeping themselves alert in the most trying of circumstances. 

Sometimes, too, they used their weapons and a few fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most they did their part in smaller towns and smaller groups. Those girls who looked Aryans could do certain tasks, others who had the faces of Polish peasants other things, but all, no matter what, did their best to keep strong in mind and body so that they could whatever was needed. If possible, they cheered each other on with songs and speeches; or they lay silently in dark cellars and waited for the time to act.  They watched each other suffer and die. There was no time to be young or to have private emotions.

Many of these women did not live to the end of the war, victims of disease, betrayal and starvation. Few of their names or backgrounds are known, although Judy Batalion does her best to give them a place in Jewish history as true martyrs. For those young women resisters who did survive, the aftermath of their ordeal was neither pleasant nor easy. Many of the men’s associations formed to memorialize the activity of Jewish resistance could not bring themselves to hear about what the women did, if they believed them at all. Ideological differences also kept the survivors from speaking out. That is why it is important, even at this late date, a lifetime and more after the events it recounts, for such as book as The Light of Days to take an honourable place in the library of books on the Holocaust.

 

False Memory, Induced Memory and Suggested Memory:
The Complexities of Determining the Truth

Norman Simmd

Personal Memory. Back in Boro Park, Brooklyn in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Our Gang of boys aged around eleven and twelve used to rent a locker at Washington Baths Annex on the board walk and go as often as we could.

We did everything together, defined ourselves by what we did and remembered, but not everyone did the same thing. Nevertheless whether you were there or not, you did and remembered the same thing.

Even if only you went away for a few days or a week with your parents to the Catskill Mountain or the Adirondacks, when you came back, in order to integrate back in the group you had say what they said and remember what they did.

Five or six might be there on Stillwell Avenue, buying drinks at the Soda-Mat or ordering Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs and French Fries, everyone said they did that: because that is what we always did. The one or two who were away, were soon back together, and everyone spoke of what we did together. Sometimes the away-nik added some details from his own memory, so that too became part our shared adventure; because we always did things together.

If I went away to some hotel or lodge, then when I got back it didn’t take long for me to know and remember everything the Old Gang would have done, and I had the same memory as everybody. That I had been in the mountains with my parents and sister, so that was something different, a different memory. Not only that I picked up new jokes, anecdotes and amusing tales, as my father would say, or crazy puns my mother would make up, or even antics my sister would perform, but they would gradually slide into the collective narrative for the gang as we rode on the BMT subway to Coney Island and back to Boro Park. 

They all became our memory. The same happened with somebody else’s family tales. Each new joke, pun, anecdote rubbed against the other as we giggled our way through the day. The more we wriggled around, the smoother it became.

By the end of summer we returned to school and family tradition, the more of this summer became like that of all the others we could recall and laugh about. By the next summer, any contradictions, anomalies or incoherencies started again.

Meanwhile, as we grew older by another year, our stories at home were about parents and siblings and our jokes, puns and anecdotes were about school. The summer brought birthdays and bar mitzvas, and we were ready to rent another locker at Washington Annex Baths.[1]

 

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[1] This is based on a number of little “Almost Very True Tales of Boro Park” I have written over many years.